UDW Day 2, Outlook Day 3

This is the fifth time we are running Ubuntu Developer Week and it always makes me a very happy man. The excitement, the fantastic talks, the really sharp people attending the sessions, the great questions and the sense of learning something new and also the sense of starting new projects soon with that new knowledge. Also I got a lot of great comments about Lernid, so if you haven’t tried it yet, be sure to give it a spin.

Let’s re-cap the sessions we had yesterday:

Java libraries packaging: in four easy to understand examples Thierry Carrez explained how to deal with java libraries and how to make them build in the Ubuntu way. He managed to give a good overview of the current state of Java packaging, so let’s hope we see an increase in good quality java packages in the near future!

Adding support for Ubuntu One to your applications: the wonderful Stuart Langridge was up next and showcased how simple and easy it is today to work with DesktopCouch as a data backend. His talk was full of nice examples so it should be easy for you to hook up your application with Ubuntu One. If you weren’t in the session, make sure you read the log.

Getting your applications in the panel: Ted Gould did a great job of explaining why the panel currently can get a bit crowded, what’s the plan in lucid and what you can do to make applications fit into the new scheme. It’s pretty easy to work with the new application indicators, so have a look at the log and talk to the Ayatana people about it!

Automated server testing: Last of the day was Søren Hansen who talked to us about automated server testing, test suites and server-specific testing. Be sure to read the log to understand how this amazing technology works and what it has to do with the number of your favourite pizza guy.

Three days left! So what’s cooking today you ask, let’s have a look together:

16:00 UTC, Writing good test-cases — John Arbash Meinel (jam): We all agree that encountering bugs in most cases is just not necessary. Sometimes it’s just a small typo that caused the problem or a wrong assumption. Enter test-cases. A lot of big open source projects have moved to test-driven development already or ask developers to add a test-case for bugs they fixed. The notion of making sure that bugs don’t happen again or that assumptions don’t suddenly change during some phase of re-design has prevented a lot of bugs. We have John Arbash Meinel here who will tell us how to cause less bugs by writing good test-cases.

17:00 UTC, Launchpad Translations under the hood — Adi Roiban (adiroiban) and Henning Eggers (henninge): Launchpad Translations is amazing. Millions of strings, thousand of translators, hundreds of languages and thousand of applications get together and make for an accessible and understandable great linux distribution. If you ever wondered how it works under the hood and how things get together, this is the perfect opportunity. Listen to what Henning and Adi have to say!

18:00 UTC, Getting started with EC2 — Scott Moser (smoser): Next up is Scott Moser who will talk to us about how to use Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Ubuntu is a great platform to use in the cloud and this session will give you an overview and cover the best tools to make your cloud experience most enjoyable.

19:00 UTC, Developing and Testing in KVM –Dustin Kirkland (kirkland): Dustin Kirkland has been working a lot with KVM, a fantastic virtualisation technology, in the last few months. Once you learned all of Dustin’s tricks you will never going to miss them for developing and testing every again.

20:00 UTC, Python Applications Packaging — Luca Falavigna (DktrKranz): Your favourite application is writting in Python? That’s quite understandable. It’s not packaged yet? Looks like a small challenge ahead. Luckily we have Luca Falavigna who can help you with the task. He’ll talk about common pitfalls, how to avoid them and how to make the task as easy as possible.